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By George Packer
$14.99
By J. M. Coetzee
$16.47
$20
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: How the media cover—and promote—war, Robert Scheer defends the messenger, AP disappears ‘illegal’ immigrants, and America’s office slaves, otherwise known as interns, rise up.
Posted on Apr 5, 2013
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: How the media cover—and promote—war, Robert Scheer defends the messenger, AP disappears “illegal” immigrants, and America’s office slaves, otherwise known as interns, rise up.
Posted on Apr 5, 2013
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Paresh Nath, Cagle Cartoons, The Khaleej Times, UAE —
Posted on Jan 28, 2013
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Matthew Wilkinson (CC-BY-ND)
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Other than a small group of people specially authorized by the government in Seoul, no South Koreans will be attending the funeral of deceased dictator, film star and golf prodigy Kim Jong Il, despite overtures from the North.
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A still from "Team America: World Police"
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North Korea’s current dictator has died. State television gives the cause of death as—and this is not a joke—exhaustion from working too hard. Kim succeeded his father in 1994 and has indicated that his third son is to take over the responsibility of oppressing the North Korean people.
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Juan Cole reports from New York on Occupy Wall Street and Palestinians at the U.N. Also: The politics of immigration; women make less than men (still), and a jury convicts the Irvine 11.
Posted on Sep 29, 2011
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Juan Cole reports from New York on Occupy Wall Street and Palestinians at the U.N. Also: The politics of immigration; women still earn less than men, and a jury convicts the Irvine 11. Pictured above, Nawaf Salam, Lebanon’s ambassador to the U.N.
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AP / Park Ji-ho
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With bombastic rhetoric and increasing tensions between the two Koreas, North Korea has threatened to use nuclear weapons against the South in a “holy war” as a response to South Korean military exercises near the DMZ.
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Although it has now been not funny longer than it was the best show on television (or ever?), “The Simpsons” is still finding ways to stay innovative. This guest title sequence, overseen by brilliant street artist Banksy, self-reflexively addresses accusations of slave labor against the show.
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U.S. Marine Corps / Lance Cpl. Christopher M. Burke
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Tensions between North and South Korea are spiraling out of control. The north has cut all ties, and Kim Jong-il reportedly ordered his forces to prepare to defend against attack. Seoul continues to push for satisfaction in the U.N. Security Council after the north allegedly torpedoed a South Korean warship. (continued)
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Here’s some good news: The White House is currently in a “vigorous debate” over whether or not to sign the Ottawa Treaty, an international agreement to ban land mines, as pressure from Capitol Hill and NGOs pushes the administration to reconsider the country’s decade-old refusal to sign.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By William Pfaff — Washington once again finds itself dangerously entangled with the hostile policies, nationalistic interests and supporters, and personal ambitions of a foreign figure whom it counted on to serve American interests.
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AP / Ahn Young-joon
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2010 might already be looking up. North Korea has sent the U.S. a New Year’s message calling for an end to hostility in relations between the two countries and declaring that Pyongyang is committed to making the Korean peninsula nuclear-free.
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AP / Caleb Jones
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By Chris Hedges — War memorials and museums are temples to the god of war. They sanitize the savage instruments of death that turn young soldiers and Marines into killers, and small villages in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq into hellish bonfires.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The hawks urging President Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan have no interest in his domestic policy. The 20th century is a graveyard of good ideas that lost out to war.
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The ruling party in South Korea passed a bill that allows print media companies to own up to a 20% share in the broadcast medium. The opposition believes this benefits only a handful of conservative media giants. So they started fighting ... in parliament. Watch the protest and the “Seoul” demonstrated by politicians for just media policies.
Posted on Jul 22, 2009
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twitter.com / kcna_dprk
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Sure, Obama and McCain (well, actually their staffs) joined micro-blogging site Twitter for propaganda purposes. But now the nuke-happy and secretive North Koreans are getting in on the Web 2.0 revolution, offering an interesting state-controlled glimpse into the isolated country.
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Wikimedia Commons
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John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, joins the podcast with a status report on the spread of nuclear weapons. Cutting a deal with Iran and North Korea while getting the U.S. and Russia to downsize their own arsenals won’t be easy, but it may be only a matter of time—and diplomacy.
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By William Pfaff — Except for the brief NATO intervention in Kosovo and Serbia, all of the significant U.S. military expeditions since the Cold War have been fought against Asians, and we have lost nearly all of them.
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Wikimedia Commons / Fastfission
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North Korea and the U.S. have agreed to the broad strokes of a nuclear disarmament deal, but hammering out the details is proving to be a monumental challenge. U.S. envoy Christopher Hill announced Thursday that talks were essentially on ice. It may or may not help that Kim Jong Il has been missing in action for months.
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Wikimedia Commons / Fastfission (altered)
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A month too late for Halloween, a congressionally mandated independent panel has come to this terrifying conclusion: “Unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.” Boo!
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Japan’s prime minister says he has information that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is “probably in hospital,” though capable of making decisions. “Anyway, his condition isn’t good,” added Prime Minister Taro Aso, who has been known to dip his toe in outrageous waters.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Rumors are flying after the North Korean dictator skipped a parade in honor of the country’s 60th anniversary. A U.S. intelligence official said Kim apparently “suffered a health setback, potentially a stroke.” Or he could be fine. News travels slow out of the hermit kingdom.
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U.S. Navy / Petty Officer 1st Class Shane T. McCoy
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One man’s torture, it seems, is another’s “coercive management technique.” For decades the United States has maintained that American prisoners were tortured by the Chinese during the Korean War. Now it turns out that at least some of the interrogation methods used at Guantanamo Bay were lifted directly from an American study of China’s Korean War era practices.
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By Eugene Robinson — Quite a “defining moment” in Iraq, wasn’t it? At this rate, John McCain is going to be proved right: The war will last a century.
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When asked in a New Hampshire town hall meeting about the possibility of being in Iraq for 50 more years, John McCain says it could be 100 years and that would be “fine with me” so long as American troops aren’t getting killed. Comparing Iraq to South Korea and Japan, McCain suggests it would behoove America to maintain a long-term military presence there.
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According to recently declassified documents, infamous FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover presented President Harry Truman with a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 people, mostly Americans, of whom he disapproved. The year was 1950 and the occasion was the start of the Korean War, but Hoover had apparently been building his list of the “potentially dangerous” for years.
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AP photo / Francois Mori
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By Barry Lando — For former “60 Minutes” producer Barry Lando, Moammar Gadhafi’s recent visit to France raised some important questions about the West’s attitudes toward tyrants. Just whom should we embrace and whom should we flatten with a bit of shock and awe?
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AP photo / B.K. Bangash
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By Andrew Cockburn — A quartet of new books provides an inside look at Pakistan’s nuclear smuggling network and how it flourished. A sordid tale of how the United States simultaneously acted as an enabler for the construction of the “Islamic Bomb” and coddled the Islamists who might one day control it.
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By Chalmers Johnson — The best-selling author of “The Sorrows of Empire” takes a look at David Halberstam’s critical history of the Korean War.
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By Joe Conason — For the first time in a long time, encouraging news is emerging from North Korea. Yet the Bush administration so far has drawn little attention to this happy achievement by its own diplomats.
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AP Photo / Ajit Kumar, File
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By Scott Ritter — Scott Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector and the author of “Waging Peace,” mourns the passing of the United Nations agency charged with monitoring Iraq’s WMD program. That agency suffered a political assassination recently to save the Bush administration any lingering embarrassment. With the closure of UNMOVIC, Ritter writes, the world has lost perhaps its last best hope for meaningful arms control and inspection.
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AP Photo / IRNA
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By Tad Daley — There’s a clear lesson to be learned from George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” approach to foreign policy: Get a bomb or get invaded. The administration’s thinking can produce nothing but unprecedented nuclear proliferation.
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theepochtimes.com
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Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is dabbling in revisionist history. Despite the historical evidence, and a 1993 apology by a government official, Abe now denies any Japanese military involvement in forcing thousands of women into brothels throughout Asia in the 1930s and ‘40s.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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North Korean and U.S. envoys met for a rare bilateral discussion on Monday in a sidebar to the six-party talks. Both sides stuck to their guns, with the U.S. saying its patience was running out, and North Korea maintaining it would not end its nuclear program until both American and U.N. sanctions are dropped.
Posted on Dec 19, 2006
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news.bbc.co.uk
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Despite the fact that the two countries are still officially at war, North and South Korea will make a joint bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympics, where they hope to compete as one country. While the rest of the world has a meltdown over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the South seems determined to resolve its differences peacefully.
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A stunner in this: “Pyongyang had refused to return to the talks until the United States separately negotiated an end to a crackdown on North Korea’s counterfeiting of U.S. currency. But that demand disappeared today…” -WashPo
Posted on Oct 31, 2006
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ticketsofrussia.com
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During a nationally broadcast town hall-style address, Russian President Vladimir Putin pitched a more open stance in dealing with North Korea: “You must never push one of the participants in talks into a corner.”
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wikipedia.org
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For his first outing as the United Nations’ newly elected secretary-general, South Korea’s Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon will visit China to discuss the situation in North Korea.
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From robokopp.de
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At the same time America is lecturing N. Korea and Iran about abandoning their nuclear weapons programs, the U.S. is pressing ahead with plans to build a new stockpile of 2,200 deployed nuclear weapons.
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un.int
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The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to impose sanctions against North Korea in light of its recent nuclear test. Though financial and military aid is restricted, the sanctions do not allow for military action, and skeptics question how effectively the rules will be enforced.
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“Airplane” director David Zucker has produced a satirical ad criticizing the Clinton administration’s dealings with North Korea that is so inflammatory that GOP strategists have refused to use it in campaigns.
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In the latest installment of the Truthdig Podcast, Robert Scheer offers his take on North Korea’s nuclear test, Iran, diplomacy, Democratic prospects and much more.
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Left: forbes.com/Right: time.blogs.com
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George W. Bush, retreating to familiar ground, has blamed the Clinton administration for North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. But the official who brokered the Clinton-era deal with North Korea called the idea “ludicrous,” and defended his efforts.
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By Molly Ivins — The way he deals with North Korea’s paranoid leader, you’d think President Bush never learned not to antagonize the crazy neighborhood bully.
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By Joe Conason — America’s invasion of Iraq has made predictable impressions on Iran and North Korea: Only military power, underscored by the actual possession of nuclear weapons, can guarantee survival against a superpower bent on regime change.
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From pub.tv2.no
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In his country’s first formal statement since its claimed atomic bomb test on Monday, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il said he would consider additional sanctions imposed on the country an act of war.
Bush said he has “no intention” of attacking Pyongyang, and that the U.S. remains committed to diplomacy, but also “reserves all options to defend our friends in the region.”
Hmm…when have we heard that one before?
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North Korea’s No. 2 leader, Kim Yong-nam, threatened a second nuclear test if the U.S. refuses to back down: “If the United States continues to take a hostile attitude and apply pressure on us in various forms, we will have no choice but to take physical steps to deal with that.”
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Greenland’s Great Melt Is Pinned On Climate Change
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